Go Live or Go Home

Marki Lemons-Ryhal, an Education Day speaker at ASI Orlando, realized the power of Facebook livestreaming when she posted a short video of herself called “Overcome the Crabs in a Barrel Mentality for Optimal Growth” that went on to earn over 20,000 views. She shot the live video in a few minutes, from the front seat of her car, with no makeup and no script.

“You can broadcast to the world from the camera in your pocket,” the social media marketing expert told a standing-room-only class of about 60 people at ASI Show Orlando on Wednesday. Further, she said, “From any device, you can listen in real time to conversations and develop social media selling plans.”

In her session, “Use LinkedIn and Facebook as Your Selling Platforms,” Lemons-Ryhal urged her audience to leverage every part of their social media platforms, create online conversations through calls to action and nurture business relationships. “Sell your value,” she said. “Not your content.”

Use Facebook to gather info on clients and potential clients, from their birthday and favorite color to their travel plans, and then refer to that info when contacting them on LinkedIn, which Lemons-Ryhal called “my number-one money-maker” because it offers a potential 500 million business contacts.

When she asked how many in the class used LinkedIn for business, nearly everyone raised their hand. By contrast, only a handful have employed Facebook livestreaming. To prove just how easy livestreaming is, Lemons-Ryhal also did a quick demo after the class. She told her audience to consider posting more videos to their company’s social media pages, saying the brain processes video 50 times faster than text and is more likely to appear higher in news feeds. You can also include ads on videos.

“I create video every single day,” said Lemons-Ryhal. “It’s so easy to do – once you don’t care what you look like. It would take me days to write a 4,000 word doc. Video can be repurposed as marketing over 200 different ways.”

Lemons-Ryhal also shared a number of other free social media tools that can help businesspeople extend and refine their content faster and easier, including:

Canva, which offers a drag-and-drop feature and professional layouts to help people easily create designs and documents for better branding.

LinkedIn SlideShare, which gives users the ability to upload and publicly or privately share PowerPoint presentations, Word documents and Adobe PDF Portfolios to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus, and to embed them on a business website.

Adobe Spark, an online and mobile graphic design app that helps users create images, videos and web pages they can post across other platforms to further share their story.

IFTTT, aka “If This Then That,” a web-based service that allows users to automatically share content across platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest.

aTtube Catcher, which allows users to change their videos to an MP3 podcast and then post it on iTunes, further extending their reach.

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